Clara Cayosa

Optimalism

Optima is a humanist typeface created by designer Hermann Zapf (German, male). Optimal is what design—and life—in 2026 wants to be: maximum productivity, maximum output. But optimal for whom, and by whose measure? Optimism is what you find in jeepney decalomania, or sari-sari store signage in the Philippines. It is the joy of everyday making, an assemblage of color and humble material. In Clara Balaguer’s words: of turning shit into gold. Optimalism is my (Filipino, female) thesis; an accumulation of what I've learned trying to persist in graphic design. This is its progression: a mastery of craft, that caring about a letterform is not precious but ethical, a practice of attention that extends to everything; a critique of a design culture increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and the logic of optimization, where speed and maximum profit have replaced discernment and authorship; and a turn toward critical optimism grounded in Filipino collectivity—the relational labor of making together—and, following curator Patrick Flores, a constellation rather than a canon: authorship as proximity and co-presence, not hierarchy; and resilience—remaining steadfast amidst forces beyond our control. Between the perfectionism that optimization demands and the pessimism it produces, there is another way of working.

Optimalism
2026
420 pages
7.525" x 9.8" 

The thesis book has section dividers made from actual manila folders—a by-product of abaca rope waste, tying the book's material back to the same vernacular resourcefulness the Optimalism argues for. The concept of progression is seen throughout the book design: each of the four sections adds a column, a typeface, and a color, so the book's layout grows more complex as the reader goes through its contents.

WORLD UNFAIR
2024
30 abstracted flags
12" x variable

WORLD UNFAIR interrogates the uneven terrain of global visibility, using contemporary spectacles like the 2024 Paris Olympics as a lens onto who gets to innovate and be seen doing so. A postcolonial and economic condition, where wealthier nations perform progress through display, while those of the Global south is positioned within a longer history of extraction — its resources, labor, and materials drawn on to build others' futures, its own left to work with whatever remains. The process of creating this installation performs the same logic in miniature: a discarded billboard, itself a residue of consumption elsewhere, becomes the ground on which the world's flags are redrawn.

30 abstracted world flags, acrylic paint and applied vinyl on repurposed billboard tarpaulin sourced from a second-hand store in California. Exhibited in For Reference Only¹: RISD MFA Graphic Design Biennial 2024.

Poor Theory
2025
25 acrylic scraps
Size varies

Poor Theory is a typography sculpture that responds to Ackbar Abbas' framework of the same name– a mode of thinking that works within limitation rather than against it; proceeding with the work through appropriation, improvisation, and cultural arbitrage. In collaboration with Josh Joseph, we set out ourselves to only work with what already exists. In this case, remains of acrylic sheets sourced from the Design Center. Notches were cut on each piece as joining points, assembling the pieces into a modular, rising structure. Text reacting to Abbas’ writing is mapped onto the structure, and reads as a whole from one perspective; parts can be read as independent fragments when disassembled or viewed from another point.

The typography was built through a process of reverse design: typeset text was projected onto the sculpture's surface, photographed to capture the variety of perspectival distortion across its form, and then manually redrawn to retain that warp. The result is a three-dimensional typography, reversing the usual design order where the physical object itself is used to shape the digital text.

Uniformity: Uniform Book
2026
Series of 4
5.75" × 5"

Handheld flipbooks, each animating a single textile pattern in progressive magnification. The flipbooks are reflections of a pattern that quietly creeps into the human one: treating the Philippine school uniform as an institution and flattening the self into compliance. Repetition, scale, and the act of noticing a pattern are the first steps toward resisting it.

Uniformity is an ongoing body of work utilizing mandatory school uniform in the Philippines, elements of it worn as sites of inquiry into cultural formation, of colonial and postcolonial rule, and the enduring mentality of Filipinos that equates the foreign and the modern with the better. In Filipino school uniforms, ingenuity and personalization persist the same logic that structures my practice in graphic design.

Composition Book
2026
11" x 17"

A play on the mass-produced composition book common in the Philippines and designed as an exhibition-in-a-book where pages are perforated to turn each into a poster. The compositions are arranged on a scan bed, using actual school uniform plaid fabric sourced from Cubao, Philippines, rulers, and measuring tape woven into varied arrangements. The book has also has progression: with each turn, more elements accumulate.

Skirting Series
2026
installation, photographs

Filipinos are known for their hospitality. Skirting Series takes a home economics lesson as its subject — the technique of table skirting, taught universally across public schools in the Philippines as a single, correct standard for formal event staging.  Where the uniform standardizes the student, the skirting covers table legs: both acts of presenting a surface and concealing the structure beneath. The series extends the technique beyond the table, skirting school objects found in the studio — a stool, an office chair and a blackboard.

Jeepnetica
2025
7.5" x 10"

Jeepnetica is a variable font developed from the points of the classic Helvetica into to a heavy display typeface inspired by the type genre of jeepneys in the Philippines. Jeepnetica’s type specimen draws inspiration from the elongated jeepneys. Helvetica was used as the starting point as they typeface for American car brand Jeep’s wordmark. The type specimen is a six-page double sided accordion book that features the progression of the variable type on one side, and an expansive illustration on the other.